How Hopis see life

There are several differences between the way we see the world through our language and the way people from other cultural groups do. This can be easily proven by the great number of differences that English and other Indo-European language have with Native American tongue,such as the Hopi language.

In Hopi, time is expressed differently from the way we are used to.  They do not count the days as if they were apples or tables, but they count them as unseen events. Therefore, we can infer that this linguistic difference may have a spiritual and abstract connotation of Hopi’s perspective of time.

Seasons and other environmental phenomena is also expressed different in this language. Instead of saying winter  they refer to this season with describing its characteristics like cold, dry, gray etc. and the fusion of these characteristics is what creates winter itself. from my point of view, this difference in the appreciation of seasons obviously is an evidence that language affects the way we see life and everything that surrounds us.

Objects that do not have concrete limits are expressed in one word and without saying the amount of it, a Hopi man wouldn’t say a cup of coffee, he’d say just coffee because in his language it is not necessary to specify the amount or the container where you want to place the substance.